Executive Reading is a resource designed for individuals looking to acquire knowledge from the most valuable business books available today. More importantly, it has been designed to enhance the retention of this information so that the knowledge embedded in these books can be recalled and utilized over the course of a reader’s lifetime.

“In my whole life, I have known no wise people who didn’t read all the time… none, zero.” – Charlie Munger

The typical book has around 350 words on a page and contains about 300 pages. Assuming that the average person can read at a rate of 300 words a minute, it takes approximately six hours to read a book. If you reach the ripe old age of eighty having read one book a month starting at age ten, you will have completed only 840 books in your lifetime. Most individuals are likely to read far less than 100 business books over the course of their career and of these, they will retain very little. Yet it is because of this limited amount of reading that it is extremely important that we be highly selective regarding what we choose to read. When one considers that thousands of business books are printed every year, selecting only the best ones appears to be quite a challenge. What is most striking to us is that, while it takes nearly six hours to read a book, we would estimate that the average person spends a small fraction of that time actually selecting what they are going to read.

“A man who doesn’t read good books has no advantage over the man who can’t read them.” – Mark Twain

The last century has brought with it a number of business books that are clearly worth their weight in gold. Unfortunately, the vast majority of what has been published is usually not worth much more than the paper it is printed upon. In search of the “gold,” we have done our best to select only books that deserve to be at the top of your bookshelf, and with the rare exception of an occasional intellectual meandering, we have only included books whose principles have been both time tested and books that are either written or endorsed by the most successful investors, innovators, and managers in the world.

“If I have seen a little further than other men, it is because I stood on the shoulders of Giants.” – Sir Isaac Newton

Simply reading great books, however, is not enough. The most attentive readers comprehend roughly 60% to 80% of the material they read, and of this reduced amount, the average person will forget the majority of what they read within a week and perhaps as much as 90% within two months. Fortunately, our minds offer us a slight remedy in that we can improve the amount of information we retain through repetition. By repeating information, you can send a signal to your brain that triggers short-term memory to be transferred to long-term memory. In its weaker form, long-term memory gives us the ability to recognize previously learned information, but when engrained in our heads through repetition, we not only obtain the ability to recognize, but also the ability to recall previously learned information.

“Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing happened.” – Winston Churchill

We take detailed notes on each book we read and these notes are intended to be a supplement, though not a substitute, to the original text. These notes can be used to refresh the material in your mind so that it remains continually accessible. In order to drive home the critical ideas and concepts, we also encourage you to help us refine our thoughts by integrating them with other viewpoints on our message boards. It is our hope that we will all be able to learn much faster collectively than individually. If the pursuit of knowledge is really a journey rather than a destination, it is a journey best experienced in good company.

“Truth is the property of no individual but is the treasure of all men.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

As a special note, we want to thank all of the people who helped make Executive Reading possible. Despite our best efforts, we are prone to making frequent and grave mistakes, and thus we are perpetually dependent on superior minds to let us know when we are in the wrong. What you see here is a cumulative effort by a large number of individuals, almost all of whom have been incredibly generous with their wisdom. In our quest for truth, we are often led astray, so here’s to all of you who have helped to lighten the load, provided solace, and always kept us on the right path.

"It is one thing to show a man that he is in error, and another to put him in possession of the truth." – John Locke